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Slammer to border, "a nervous way to live." Life behind bars is a crunching montage, Doc (Steve McQueen) cracks and asks the missus (Ali MacGraw) to spring him, "a man of political influence" (Ben Johnson) has plans for them. The prisoner's luxuriant pleasure in a park after release points up High Sierra as a mainstay, the awkwardness of intimacy afterward proceeds from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Freedom isn't free, the minute planning of a bank robbery gives way to jittery execution, in the wake are three corpses or rather two and a half—left for dead, the sadistic henchman (Al Lettieri) pursues the couple to the edge of the world. "I always heard what a smart-ass operator you was." "No applause." From Walter Hill's adroit streamlining of Jim Thompson pulp, Sam Peckinpah's slickest, coldest formulation. The hero is a coiled automaton, at his most expressive when smacking his wife for a perceived betrayal or dismantling a police car with a shotgun. His opposite number finds his own inamorata in the bored wife (Sally Struthers) of a veterinarian (Jack Dodson), their paths are wickedly braided with a cut from drive-in restaurant to motel room, the same song playing on the fugitives' car radio and on the blonde's headphones as she romps with the hulking captor and her bound husband watches. (The cruel punchline has the cuckold dangling in the bathroom as a preacher rages over the airwaves.) The con man on the train updates a chase from The 39 Steps, marriage is something sorted out in the back of a Volkswagen carcass in the wasteland of a Texas landfill. "We've come a lot of miles, but we're not close to anything." The elision of Thompson's delirious epilogue is amply remedied in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. With Richard Bright, Dub Taylor, Slim Pickens, Bo Hopkins, Roy Jenson, and John Bryson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |